Television/Streaming: Red Oaks (2015)
As I get older I find myself being forgetful or not being able to recall something quickly. I’ve been told it comes with the territory and there’s nothing you can do about it. And I already knew that lack of sleep can challenge my memory and recall so when you put the two together that could be a recipe for disaster.
The night before this shoot and the night before that I had gotten very little sleep because of another project I was working on and partly because I hadn’t been sleeping well. And the 5am call time to meet the van was even more of an obstacle. While sitting in the hair and make-up trailer I knew it was going to be a long day because I had trouble going over my lines. When shooting started I was okay with the master scene but when the Director started to break down the scene and repeat takes I started to forget words and then I put lines in the wrong order. Retake. Retake. Then I couldn’t remember where one line came in. The Director was getting frustrated and at one point she yelled, “get him out of there!”. I thought she was going to have another actor, maybe a background actor, do the scene. She and the writer came over and asked me what was wrong. She was perplexed because she obviously liked my audition tape or she wouldn’t have cast me. You can’t tell them I had very little sleep the previous two days because that’s not an excuse to them or anyone in the industry. You suck it up and give them what they want. I told them I knew the lines but I just couldn’t consistently remember where the one line comes in. We started shooting again but I was still getting that line out of order. My brain was mush. Finally, the lead actor of the show stopped everything and he had me repeat all of my lines in the scene several times. The entire set was still – two camera crews, the sound crew, the lighting crew, a restaurant full of background actors, all listening to me repeat my lines.
I was six years removed from Japanoir but this experience was different because it was concentrated in a half-day shoot though it was in the same genre of “why the fuck is this happening to me?” I was a veteran of this genre by now so I remained somewhat calm throughout the time we spent getting me through the scene. Maybe my calm demeanor irked her a little, as if I was doing it deliberately. If I had shown some frustration perhaps it would have been more understandable to her though it wouldn’t have solved my problem. As it turned out the repetitive line run through worked because I was able to make the correct line placement and she got the shot that she wanted. Later at lunch she walked past the table where I was sitting and looked at me still perplexed. I went over to her and apologized for the difficulty I had shooting the scene and hinted at a rough two days prior. She just nodded.
Days like that are the times that define my journey. As I said in my Statement of Intent, I expected this experience to be painful but the emotional growth from Japanoir to Red Oaks was reflected in the fact that I remained calm and didn’t become flustered. That’s progress. That’s a positive. And to all those observing my shoot there must have been all manor of anger, empathy, anxiety etc., at my plight. But for me it was another marker on a path forward and I should try not to give the experience any more or less weight than it deserved. Move on.
